Gonna need to work on this a bit....

I survived it! Me, an introvert at a department meeting that ran from Monday afternoon to Wednesday afternoon. All done and I made it, mostly thanks to the fact that I got permission to bow out of the Tuesday evening events. And thanks to the fact that the people there were cool.

I did do the looong dinner on Monday, after which I went back to the hotel and....could barely sleep. I was just kinda thrown off kilter.

As I tossed and turned, I thought about many things. Like how I am very, very attached to routines and how much I hate it when they are disrupted, as they were with this meeting and late night. I also thought of how I used to do routine-altering stuff all the time. (Like jetting off to Vancouver, solo, to attend a fan con for 4 days. But that was for something fun. I used to do all sorts of routine-disrupting stuff for work too though. Like driving for 6 hours to Cincinnati one day, presenting the next morning, and driving back. Or leaving Sunday for a trip that required me to change planes, sitting on a panel Monday morning, and then making the long trip back). So I used to do this stuff a lot. I guess it has really thrown me because the past 2 years have been so quiet with the lock downs.

I hadn't slept in a hotel room for a while, so that didn't help. I missed my own bed and the familiar patterns, the room was at first too cold and then too hot, etc etc. 

Regardless, I don't like that I felt so disrupted, to the point of hardly sleeping that night. I wonder if I might need to:

1. Intentionally find things to do to occasionally step out of my routine
2. Seek out new things to learn, just to get some new brain pathways going

I need to think about this...Gonna give it more thought.



(Tuesday evening I slept like a baby, so today I feel wonderful again!)